{"id":17841,"date":"2021-11-30T04:30:11","date_gmt":"2021-11-30T09:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/?p=17841"},"modified":"2023-02-06T06:21:55","modified_gmt":"2023-02-06T11:21:55","slug":"microsoft-teams-configuration-citrix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/microsoft-teams-configuration-citrix\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Teams on Citrix: Best Practices"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

<\/span>Key Considerations and Best Practices for Microsoft Teams on Citrix<\/span><\/h2>\n

Since early 2020, there has been a massive growth in the number of active Microsoft Teams users and organizations deploying Teams; now, there are more than 200 million monthly active users across the globe.<\/p>\n

With an increase in market share, it’s one of those applications that you either expect an organization to be already using or planning to deploy out to their environment sooner rather than later. This means that a lot of existing and also new Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments are under scope for Teams deployment and consumption. Multimedia processing, however, can quickly send the end-user experience south. Play a simple video on any device and you will notice that first and foremost the CPU takes a hit, but x times that by multiple users at once across shared hypervisors and you can start to imagine the impact it may have on your Citrix deployments and the end user experience.<\/p>\n

Given that many people are working from home, and therefore, using Teams to host one-to-one or multi-party calls, we need to make sure that the video and audio quality delivered via Teams is great and VDI or session-based users do not take a performance hit whenever audio and\/or video calls are taking place.<\/p>\n

To help achieve that, we can use HDX Optimization for Teams, jointly developed by both Citrix and Microsoft, to offload media processing to the endpoint itself.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Overview of How HDX Optimization for Microsoft Teams Works<\/span><\/h2>\n

<\/span>Generic Delivery of Teams<\/span><\/h3>\n

If you are familiar with delivering Skype for Business using the HDX RealTime Optimization pack, you’ll be aware of the term Generic delivery<\/strong>. With generic delivery of Teams, the video and audio traffic “hairpins” from the user endpoint to the Citrix VDA and back to the endpoint, which degrades video and audio quality whilst placing high resource consumption load on the VDAs themselves.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Optimized Delivery of Teams<\/span><\/h3>\n

HDX Optimization for Teams allows you to deliver 720p high-definition video calls at 30fps through your Virtual Apps and Desktops solution. This is made possible using the WebRTC media stack.<\/p>\n

The optimized solution can be thought of as splitting the Teams client into two, with the user interface living inside of the VDA and the media rendering\/engine running on the endpoint. This shifts resource consumption to the endpoint, reducing impact on your VDAs, and shapes the Teams audio and video traffic in a much more optimized fashion because now media traffic flows point-to-point between clients or the Teams conferencing service in Microsoft 365.<\/p>\n

Other advantages of optimized Teams delivery:<\/p>\n